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Interviews: Jon "Maddog" Hall

Jon Hall, president of Linux® International, is a passionate spokesman for the open source community and ideal. In this two-part interview, he speaks at length on the progress and challenges for open source, and on the need to recapture a purer vision of education.

Over a 30-plus-year career, Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, author, consultant to local, state and national governments worldwide and college educator. He is currently an industry consultant. While at Digital, he became interested in Linux and was instrumental in obtaining equipment and resources for Linus Torvalds to accomplish his first port, to Digital's Alpha platform. Hall serves on the boards of several companies, and several nonprofit organizations. At the U.K. Linux and Open Source Awards 2006, he was honored with a Lifetime Recognition Award for his services to the open source community.

More in Tux Machines

Clonezilla Live 2.4.0-7 Released to Fix a Btrfs Issue, Based on Debian Sid

Steven Shiau has released a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system aimed at system administrators who want an easy-to-use, portable, and straightforward solution for cloning disk drives.

Lumina Desktop 0.8.3 Released!

The next version of the Lumina Desktop Environment has just been released!
This is mainly a bugfix release to correct an urgent issue with the system tray on FreeBSD 11, but there are a number of other slight improvements/updates included as well. The full list of changes is included at the bottom of this announcement, but the notable changes are as follows:
New Panel Plugin: “Application Launcher“
This allows the user to pin the shortcut for an application directly to a panel.
New Utility: “lumina-xconfig“
This utility allows the user to easily enable/disable additional monitors/screens within the desktop session.
Fix the issue with transparent system tray icons on FreeBSD 11
Add support for the XDG autostart specifications.

Netflix has more than 50 open source projects

My team has become very fond of an open source tool called Browserify. It was originally designed to allow the Node.js modules to be used in the browser, but we’ve leveraged it as the primary component in our build process. Over the last year, it has helped us to turn our monolithic code into a set of independent, maintainable modules. Previously, we were concatenating a big file and maintaining subsystem independence using namespaces, so this has been a big change for us.

Cinnamon 2.4.7 Arrives with Numerous Fixes, Should Be in Repos Soon

Cinnamon is a desktop environment built by the Linux Mint team and it's implemented by default in the Mint OSes. The current update, 2.4.7 is just a maintenance one, but it's pretty extensive and it comes with a ton of changes.

Latest News

Jessie Release Date: 2015-04-25

We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We
have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for
a release of Debian 8 - "Jessie".
The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical
pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up
technically unable to release that weekend.
Please keep in mind that we intend to have a quiet period from
Saturday the 18th of April. Bug fixes must be *in Jessie* before
then.

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.